It’s striking that David Weprin, Democratic candidate for congress in Brooklyn, said of the attacks yesterday in Israel, “This highlights the fact that giving up land for peace is never a good idea.” As a friend notes, That’s astonishingly ignorant talk. What’s he suggesting, permanent colonization?
Weprin ought to see Hamlet.
Last week, I saw this production. I was completely focused on the Palestinian angle. Of course it is a revenge story, but one element of the revenge is irredentist: about the recovery of land. In the first act we learn that young Fortinbras of Norway is threatening Denmark because Fortinbras’s father was killed by Hamlet’s father, the king, some 25 or 30 years before, when Denmark took a lot of Norway’s territory. And then at the end of the play, Fortinbras comes on the stage. He’s conquered, and he says, “I have some rights of memory in this kingdom, Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me.” And Hamlet, whose own revenge story has concluded at this point with a bunch of bodies piled on stage, says, “He has my dying voice.” So he endorses Fortinbras’s recovery of lands– surely in defiance of his own father’s wishes…
Irredentism is a powerful and often destructive force. Hundreds of thousands were killed along the India-Pakistan border during irredentist struggles following Partition. The Serbs don’t recognize Kosovo, they have some rights of memory in that kingdom… And yet it is an everlasting force, as Hamlet proves, and the best answer to the violent impulse to recover lost property is international law: UN resolutions on the right of return and the end of the occupation, long ignored by Israel and its friends who believe they can have security without fairness…
[Tangential P.S. I have to say that the performance of Hamlet by Matthew Amendt was stunning. Remember that name. To see a young man make Hamlet his own– adolescent, passionate, over-intellectual, punklike– as if he were the first person playing the role– I was standing with everyone else at the end.]
